Syria (/ˈsɪriə/ ( listen) SIRR-ee-ə; Arabic: سورية‎ Sūriyya or سوريا Sūryā; Syriac: ܣܘܪܝܐ; Kurdish: Sûrî), officially the Syrian Arab Republic (Arabic: الجمهورية العربية السورية‎ al-Jumhūriyyah al-‘Arabīyah as-Sūriyyah  Arabic pronunciation (help·info)), is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest.

In English, the name Syria was formerly synonymous with the Levant, known in Arabic as Sham, while the modern state encompasses the sites of several ancient kingdoms and empires, including the Eblan civilization of the third millennium BC. In the Islamic era, its capital city, Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, was the seat of the Umayyad Caliphate, and a provincial capital of the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt.

The population of Syria is 74% Sunni, 12% Alawi, 10% Christian, and 3% Druze. Combined, 87% of the Syrian population is Muslim, while the other 10% is Christian, which includes mainly Arab Christians but also Assyrians and Armenians. Major ethnic minorities in Syria include Kurds (9%), Assyrians, Armenians, Turkmens and Circassians. The majority of the population is Arab (90%).

Gianna Nannini (born 14 June 1954) is an Italian female singer-songwriter and pop musician. She may be best known for her 1986 song "Bello e Impossibile".

Born in Siena on 14 June 1954, Nannini studied piano in Lucca and then composition in Milan. She is the older sister of former Formula One racing driver Alessandro Nannini. She graduated in philosophy from the University of Siena in 1994. The following year she took part in a protest organized by Greenpeace at the French embassy in Rome against the decision of the French government to pursue nuclear experiments at Mururoa. In August 2010 she announced that she was pregnant and that she would dedicate the upcoming album to her child. Gianna showed off her pregnancy on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine wearing a T-shirt with the inscription ‘God is a woman’. On 26 November 2010 at 12am Nannini's daughter Penelope Jane Charlotte was born on the seventh floor of the Madonnina Clinic in Milan. The girl weighed 2.530 kilos and was 48 cm long.

Isabella Santacroce (born April 30, 1970 in Riccione) is an Italian novelist.

Isabella Santacroce was born and lives in Riccione. Her literary startup began in the 1990s with her debut novel Fluo, the first book of the trilogy "Trilogia dello spavento" (trilogy of the frightened) (the other two are Destroy and Luminal). Destroy in particular is of interest in Italy, described by Alessandro Baricco as a "book to read, if Enrico Brizzi is talented, there is double talent in the book".

Santacroce was grouped together with the Giovani Cannibali, (young Cannibals) a literary movement developed at the end of the Nineties (representative of that is the volume Gioventù Cannibale (young cannibals) published by Einaudi), formed by Italian young writers. Among them, Tiziano Scarpa, Aldo Nove, Niccolò Ammaniti, Enrico Brizzi, Tommaso Labranca, Tommaso Ottonieri, Luca Ragagnin and others together with Santacroce, give birth in 1997 to a philosophical-literally movement called, il Nevroromanticismo, (the neuralromanticism) which means to express the unquiteness of existence.